The financial tech company Wise, formerly TransferWise, offers a cheap way to send money from the U.S. to over 70 countries. The exchange rates are some of the best you’ll find. You can fund a Wise money transfer in various ways, such as with a bank account or credit card, but recipients need to have a bank account.

I don’t really use their main feature that much but have found some other Wise services very useful. Here are my favorite things:

Debit Cards

This is only available in some countries. You can obtain a physical VISA card that will allow you to use your Wise balance in the real world without transfering money to your local bank account.

Virtual Cards and “Freezing”

You can generate virtual credit cards on the fly. This is very useful if you want to pay on websites that you don’t trust or when you don’t want the vendor to automatically withdraw monthly payments. Once again, you would use the funds in your Wise account. After submitting payment, you can then freeze that virtual card number until next time.

International Accounts

If, as a Canadian, you ever need a US-based account in order to receive US dollar payments, Wise gives you that, with routing number, branch address and all that. Same thing for receiving Euro bank transfers and other currencies.

Promo code link

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Article published at Morningstar.com, written by Pat Dorsey, CFA on July 21st, 2006. See PDF attachment.

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It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery, and be sold.

Everything happens in cycles within cycles, and humanity keeps on ticking. We keep on living. That is my gift to you for the holidays – hope that no matter how crazy things seem right now, know that you will prevail.

~ Happy Holidays ~

P.S. Still accepting suggestions for business gift ideas

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• Extreme Saving: Setting a retirement goal of age 35 — the comments are pretty interesting, but then, I’ve been living under a rock for a couple of years, shunning both mass media and most online forums.
• 5 reasons investors can’t set it and forget it — this is about the dangers of stop-losses. Funny comments, again. Like this one: “Obviously Hodson didn’t believe in stop loss orders when running a growth fund in 2008 he was down over 70% at one point in 2008…shouldn’t be allowed to give advice to anyone about running money…..brutal.” Always, consider the source.
• Simple Savings — the slogan here is “Learn to save money on just about EVERYTHING!”. Frankly, I find the look of the website daunting although it has a huge following and probably a plethora of awesome savings tips. Despite keeping the page open for a couple of weeks, I haven’t gone beyond the front page. From time to time, I just like to glance at the shocking cost of skincare on the opening page. That fact alone is worth a visit.
• Back in March, Questrade IQ was updated to allow mini options trading. Here’s more info on that.
• “President Obama and his family will be going to Africa later this month. But the trip won’t be cheap; it’s expected to cost American taxpayers $60 to $100 million, according to the Washington Post.” Mmmmmkay…

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Here’s a few random news items and links of interest:

• Tax havens explained: How the rich hide money – an interactive guide to offshore tax havens. Hope to need this one day, ha!
• Dividend Detective – recently rediscovered this website. A lot of the lists are available for free. With some elbow grease and charting, great picks can be found.
• Multpl.com – I was very reluctant to share this, it’s such an awesome website, lol. Every market-related statistic you may wish to see, all inflation-adjusted since 1880’s to present. On paper everything is really pretty bad and getting worse – S&P dividend yield, US Real GDP, US Median Income Growth, US Income Per Capita… S&P Earnings are rising though, hmmm. Could it be due to the accounting changes? A lot can be done with that, you know… And apparently inflation is at 0% now. If true, then why are the banks now offering 1.35% to 1.55% on term deposits, GIC’s and other savings accounts?
• Google Reader will be shut down on July 1, 2013. What are you switching to?

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EDIT: According to Wiki, the list in the video is incorrect, but it’s still a pretty interesting documentary, giving a glimpse into the lives of the rich and powerful.

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Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous year!

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I’ve got over a thousand posts now and nearly twelve hundred comments. Yes, I can hardly believe it myself. So what’s a girl to do? I’ve been thinking of moving this website to a domain that’s named more appropriately. Opinions? should I bother? were you turned off the site when you first came across it (because of the name or something else)?

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